Last week on Pi Day marked the release of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ with a slightly higher clocked Cortex-A53 processors, dual-band 802.11ac WiFi, faster Ethernet, and other minor enhancements over its predecessor. I've been spending the past few days putting the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ through its paces the past few days with an array of benchmarks while comparing the performance to other ARM SBCs as well as a few lower-end Intel x86 systems too. Here is all you need to know about the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ performance.

The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ comes in at the usual $35 USD price point. I was able to buy a unit for testing shortly after launch from Adafruit, but to little surprise a few days later most of the retailers are already out-of--stock on the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ or at some are not yet stocked in the first place... The challenge of new Raspberry Pi launches often seems to be the availability.

The primary changes with the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ is a 1.4GHz quad-core Cortex-A53 CPU (over 1.2GHz quad-core on the Model B), dual-band 802.11ac WiFi and Bluetooth 4.2, faster Ethernet but is still running off the USB 2.0 bus, Power-over-Ethernet support, improved PXE network / USB mass-storage booting, and improved thermal management. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has talked up the Model B+ as having about three times better wired/wireless throughput.

Element14 continues to be a manufacturer of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Plus.

The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ looks nearly identical to the earlier Raspberry Pi Model B boards... Still no USB 3.0 connectivity, but hopefully that will come for the Raspberry Pi 4. We would also love to see a Raspberry Pi with the newer Broadcom VC5 graphics engine for allowing better OpenGL as well as the in-progress open-source OpenCL and Vulkan support to be tackled by Eric Anholt and those working on this free software graphics driver stack.

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